


in the land of gods and monsters

by SomeEnchantedEve



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Love/Hate, Missing Scene, One-Sided Attraction, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27002332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeEnchantedEve/pseuds/SomeEnchantedEve
Summary: "Buried six feet beneath the protection of Louisiana mud, Cordelia Goode dreams of spring.At least, she thinks it must be a dream."--Based on the fandom theory that the Sanctuary was at Miss Robichaux's Academy.
Relationships: Cordelia Foxx | Cordelia Goode/Michael Langdon
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26





	in the land of gods and monsters

**Author's Note:**

> This has been in progress for over a year, and I finally sacked up and finished it. I'm still not 100% thrilled with how it came out, but after so long of having no writing/fic inspiration at all, it's nice to finally write *something*. Hopefully people still care about Apocalypse after so long!
> 
> A missing scene based on the fan theory that the Sanctuary was actually at Robichaux's - when I first heard that theory, I thought immediately of how interesting it would be to have Cordelia and Michael meet there.

Buried six feet beneath the protection of Louisiana mud, Cordelia Goode dreams of spring. 

At least, she thinks it must be a dream. 

When she opens her eyes, she finds herself in some sort of courtyard, with white washed walls made of swirled marble. She would have thought it some kind of grand hall – overwhelming enough to be a palace – but beneath her black heeled boots there is grass plush and verdant, and before her, the biggest apple tree she’s ever seen stretches towards an endless expanse of blue sky, with fruit dark as blood just above the stretch of her fingertips. The trunk is as wide as the breadth of her spread arms, and far above her head, it splits into two long arms, weaving up and up like two twin staircases leading to the unknown. She is inside and outside, somehow at the same time. 

It is like nothing she has ever seen, and Cordelia has seen her share of sights that the world has to offer, both the good and the bad. The colors are so vividly bright that they remind her more of a child’s painting than how she remembers the world - the world, she reminds herself, that no longer exists. It is a marvel, a wonder – _an Eden_ , she thinks, too unvarnished and untouched to be real. She tilts her face to the sky and feels the sweet warm caress of the sun on her cheeks, gentle as a mother’s kiss (though, Cordelia admits, perhaps not _her_ mother), yet when she opens her eyes she can see the twinkling of a thousand stars just beyond the expanse of blue sky, morning and night all at once, the entire cosmos lying before her, going on and on. 

_An enchantment,_ she corrects herself sternly, and it is with that in mind that she realizes that if she forces herself to concentrate beyond the hedonistic assault of the senses, there are things that are just…not quite right. In such a natural paradise, she’d expect to hear the trilling of birds in the tree, the rustle of grass as small critters moved about, but she is surrounded instead by nothing but silence. And though she can smell the crisp freshness of the apples, the dew that clings to the grass, beneath that there is the scent of something harder, something metallic, something… _darker._ With more cynical eyes, the blues and greens and reds that surround her seem almost garish, comically exaggerated, made by someone who imagined what paradise might be like but had never experienced the simple pleasure a cool spring day may bring. It is an Eden devised by someone who has never truly imagined it. 

“Hello?” she calls warily, and her voice echoes back to her, sounding unnaturally high and almost mocking, _hello, hello, hello._

There is no other reply. There is no one and nothing. 

Her feet move almost of their own accord, as though they know where to go, as though she is treading familiar paths, and she moves like a silent shadow through a long hallway, her footsteps muffled by a thick carpet. Yet despite all the quietude, despite every suggestion that she is alone, she cannot help but feel as though she is being watched, a pair of invisible eyes following her, stalking her. 

As a girl, as a young woman, she would have hunched her shoulders and hurried along with her gaze to the floor, curled in on herself, hoping to remain unseen. But that had been a long time ago, so long it feels almost like another person – a child desperate for her mother’s affections, a woman tricked and swayed by a man’s handsome face and sweet promises. The woman she is now, the Supreme she has tried to be, strides forth instead with her chin lifted - defiant, proud, powerful, her eyes scanning the empty expanse in front of her, in search of the invisible challenger that must still await her. 

She steps through a marble archway, and now she is in a glass garden, overflowing with exotic flowers, of every variety and color – delicate lilies, butter-yellow angel’s trumpets, bright arabian jasmine, laceleaf as large as her head, all carefully cultivated and kept. She reaches out to touch a petal with appreciative fingers, still at heart that girl in the greenhouse, bent over her quiet work, dedicated and invisible – just how she had wanted it. 

It is hot enough that she has to swing her cloak from her shoulders, and in a move that feels all too familiar, she lays it down on the work table to her right, and it is then that she double-takes, her palm running along the worn wood. She knows without looking that if she glanced beneath the table, she would find the initials of a young girl on her own for the first time and afraid, scrawling her name as though that would give her a place, finding quiet solace in the solitude of the glass gardens. She slips her finger below the lip of the table and traces the grooves lightly, the _C.G._ that had somehow withstood everything – including the end of the world. 

_Robichaux’s_ , she mouths, her lips tremulous as though it is too heavy of a sorrow to speak the word out loud. 

It is not the Robichaux’s of her vision, torn to nothing more than rubble and overrun by demons, but it is still the academy, ruined in a more beautiful way than she had foreseen but destroyed all the same. She continues to trace her own initials with restless fingers and memory washes over her like the tide. Fiona craning her neck to see her work, her lips puckered into a disappointing frown. Misty’s radiant smile, her fingers laced through Cordelia’s, _we make a good team, you and I._ A dozen young heads bent down over their work, eyes lowered in concentration, a soft murmuring as soothing as music – her charges, her coven, her _girls_. Zoe walking between the tables, hands clasped behind her back, voice authoritative but calm, soothing, as steady and still as a spring pond. Queenie, in turn, had always been more animated, spinning spells and stories with her hands as much as her voice. 

_Had,_ it is _had_ because they are gone now, all of them gone, and suddenly she recognizes that lingering metallic smell that she had not been able to place – the smell of blood – and she quickly draws her hand away, gagging. It is the spilt blood of her girls, lingering beneath all the lush beauty that has overrun the academy like a virus – a mere mask for what lies beneath. 

“What do you think? Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” 

She stiffens. 

It is probably a good thing that he speaks before she turns; Michael Langdon’s voice – always so honeyed and self-satisfied – is more immediately recognizable than his face. Gone is the adolescent pout to his lips, the childish softness of his cheeks and jaw – his cheekbones are sharper, his face leaner and more angular, his eyes as hard and dark as two glittering pieces of obsidian, his youthful curls grown sleekly to his shoulders. Gone is the boy; this is a man, and a dangerous man at that. _Have I been asleep so long?_ she cannot help but worry, wondering how much time has passed above the surface while she waits below to awaken again. Has it been years, a decade, more? 

But then she remembers what Madison had said, what the spirit had told her at that house - _it’s like he was in a hurry to grow up._ And grow up he had, into something dark and sinister, an evil energy rolling off his aura so strongly that Cordelia can almost taste it on her tongue. 

He stands a mere few feet away from her, and he does not seem surprised to see her. In fact, he seems almost pleased, the corners of his lips curled up in what would be called a smile were it not so sinister. _A sneer,_ she thinks, is more appropriate. 

He has one of the apples from the tree in his hand, enormous and so shiny that she can see her reflection cast off it, and when she does not speak, he proffers it out to her. “Apple?” he asks, his voice the picture of innocent curiosity, and a shiver goes down Cordelia’s spine, like a cold breath on the back of her neck. 

He chuckles darkly when she recoils. “It isn’t _poison_ ,” he says, and he sounds almost affronted at the thought. “I wouldn’t deign to _poison_ you. So impersonal.” And as to accentuate his point, he takes a large bite of the dark flesh, licking the ripe juices from his lips, his eyes locked on hers, a brilliant blue. 

_And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die, and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat…_

She’d like nothing more than to destroy him where he stood, after what he did to her girls, to her home. But he had been too powerful to face when he had taken Robichaux’s, before the nuclear bombs fell, and now…

She may be the most powerful witch in the world, but even her power has limits. _And besides, this is only a dream…isn’t it?_

“What is this place?” she asks, her voice hard and strained, hissing out around clenched teeth. 

“Sanctuary,” he answers simply, the word a satisfied sigh. Beside his head, giant white roses twist around a trellis leaning against the glass, and with long, graceful fingers, he reaches out to stroke one. At the first brush of his fingertips, the petals turn black and fall, as though his very touch is death. Cordelia suppresses a shudder. _I will not let him see me falter._ “A safe place for the worthy and the chosen, to begin to create our new world, in my father’s image.” 

“But there’s no one here,” she points out, and he flashes white teeth at her, more of a snarl than a smile, as though she has just said something enormously clever. 

“Well-spotted. Sadly, I’ve found your kind so lacking that it is proving more difficult than I thought to weed out the worthy ones.” 

She raises her eyebrows. “’Your kind?’” she echoes. From remembering Madison’s tale, she can almost see the ghost of Vivian Harmon in her mind, her hands folded over her empty stomach, _he has come to destroy the world._. “Your kind as well, remember.” 

The smile fades from his face, and Cordelia feels a small flutter of triumph in her belly at the sullen, angry scowl that briefly replaces it. He regains his composure quickly enough, rearranging his face into passive boredom, but the damage is done, and there, _there_ she sees that beneath it all he is still a spoiled, sulking boy, a bratty child looking to use the world as his plaything. 

“You know, perhaps we are of a kind,” he replies after a moment, tilting his head as though he is considering it. His hair falls in a silken waterfall over his shoulder, like a wave of golden grain. “Both with power others could only dream of possessing. Both with mothers who would rather see us dead than see us bloom into that power.” 

Now it is Cordelia’s turn to bristle, as in her mind’s eye the face of Vivian Harmon twists into Fiona’s cold, calculating expression. “I’m nothing like you,” she spits, and she doesn’t know who she is addressing – the man standing before her or the mother in her memory. 

He smiles lazily, clearly pleased at having riled her, watching through long, lowered lashes. “No,” he agrees. “You’re like them – weak and unworthy. A pity. In another world, we could have built something exquisite together.” He tilts his face up towards the skylights, and the sun dapples over his high cheekbones. He closes his eyes, dreamily content in the palace of his own making, entirely pleased with himself, and yet Cordelia cannot shake the feeling that he can see her still, behind his shuttered eyelids, that he is only trying to lower her guard before he strikes like a coiled snake. 

“Why here?” she asks, and she tries to keep the question light, a curiosity rather than an accusation, an oddity rather than a violation. She would never give him the satisfaction of knowing how deeply it cuts, to see her home – the only home she’s ever known – perverted and corrupted into some twisted paradise, a fun-house Eden for his dark new world. Robichaux’s had been _her_ sanctuary – from an abusive mother, an absent father, a miserable childhood – long before the son of Satan had commandeered it to be his own. 

He keeps his smile and meet her eye again, his gaze glittering and cold. He’s pleased by the question; he is proud of his choice, amused by his own cleverness, and he wants to brag about it. Perhaps he wants to brag about it to her in particular. “The walls here already run heavy with magic. It leaves an imprint – a fingerprint, if you will – on the very bones of the building. It was so simple to create exactly the sanctuary I envisioned with such a willing, pliable vessel.” The words roll off his tongue like a melody, his tone almost coaxing, as though hoping that she, too, would be willing and pliable to his whim. 

She had been so vulnerable to those manipulations, once – by her mother, by her husband. She had sworn to herself - _never again._

And so she smirks, throwing off the notion. “So you chose it because it was easy,” she mocks. 

He does not take the bait this time, his eyes hooded. He leans in, and she forces herself to stand at her full height, spine ramrod straight, even as he brackets her hips by planting his hands on the table behind her. Her mouth thins into a line as he crowds her, as he cranes his neck to whisper into her ear, his breath pouring over her skin and creeping down her neck, an unwanted warm caress. “I chose it because it was _yours_ ,” he murmurs, his voice husky, as intimate as a lover. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see his hands slide to grip the edges of the worktable, his fingers trembling with conviction, with emotion. “I am going to take everything from you until there’s nothing left,” he swears, and she forces herself to not flinch as his lips brush over her earlobe. 

He draws away just enough that he can meet her gaze, and his declaration has unraveled him, the cool mask melting away and leaving only wildness in his eyes, a perfect tightrope of hatred and desire. His tongue darts out distractedly to moisten his lips, and his knee slides fractionally forward, just barely brushing against the front of her thighs, as though he wants to push it between her legs. His eyes drop to her mouth, and he stares hard, as though he cannot decide if he wants to bite or to hit or to kiss and as though he might find the answer on her face. 

His breath quickens, a harsh rush, and his knuckles are white. 

Cordelia’s nose wrinkles in distaste. How very like a man, to derive a sexual thrill from the thought of a woman’s destruction, to conflate fucking and ruining. He may try to deny the human blood that runs through his veins, but his own worst instincts betray him, that bubbling needy desire to take and to take and to take. 

Michael’s eyes leave her mouth and he scowls when he takes in her sour disgust, drawing away as though he has been scalded by her. He looks once more like the spoiled boy she knows he truly is when he looks at her so dolefully, so upset that she will not bend and break to his will even as he whispers lullabies of her destruction in her ear. It is a trick he has perfected, toying with his food before devouring it whole, and he is unused to his prey refusing to be drawn in. 

And now it is her turn to smile, and she smooths the front of her black dress with wide palms. “You’re alone in the world,” she points out, and he flinches; there is a flicker there in his eyes, for just a moment, the slightest spark of true humanity, a child thirsting for love, the expression she had seen in that field where she had offered him her hand, thinking that perhaps even he could be saved. 

That perhaps she could be the one to do it, for she had been that unloved child once, desperate for a place to belong. 

He had rebuked her, though, and turned away, and there is nothing to be done for it now. “You’ll never have everything,” she promises, and her words hang heavy in the air. 

There is so much that he has taken, things that can never be righted even with the power of the Supremacy at her hands, and yet she will never, _never_ allow him everything. He can take their school, twist it into something perverse, but their coven will live on, a thousand years after she is dead, and he will have nothing to show for his sanctuary and his new world but a trail of dead flowers left in his wake. 

He exhales, frustrated. “Are you here?” he demands suddenly, plaintively, and his hand reaches out, though he does not touch her. His fingers tremble in the air before her, and she does not know if he wants to stroke her hair or close his fist around her throat. Perhaps he himself does not know which to choose. “Are you truly here?” And for all that he had deemed her as unworthy as the rest, there is a neediness in the back of his throat that coats his words. 

Cordelia bites back an immediate denial. _This is a dream, just a vivid dream,_ she thinks to herself, and she tries to forget the feeling of his breath on her neck, the brush of his leg against the front of her dress. 

_But is it my dream, or his?_ she thinks – a question that seems absurd on his face, but why would she dream of such trepidation on Langdon’s face, such a strange mix of hope and dread as to what her answer may be. _He wants me here,_ she realizes, he has been waiting, searching, and with his powers could have brought her here on the weight of his yearning alone. 

Yet she has power of her own still – perhaps not as strong, but still formidable – and she swears if she flexes her fingers, she can still feel the mud slick between her fingertips, that she can hear the gentle _hush-rush_ of Madison and Myrtle’s breath as they slumber beside her, as they all wait to rise again. 

The power of the Supremacy and the mystery of Louisiana mud – perhaps it is just enough to foil him in this. 

Now it is her time to lean in, and his neck strains just slightly towards her, desperate for her secrets. “You’ll always wonder,” she says, and he jerks back as though she has struck him. 

Cordelia lifts her cloak again, and leaves him to wonder. Let the thought torment him for a little while, tease at the corner of his mind like a constant headache. Soon enough they will be forced to meet again above the surface, but until then, she is content to haunt him through the corridors of what he stole from her – whether it be in his dreams or her own.


End file.
